Retired Napa teacher recounts family's harrowing WWII story in book

Henry Michalski teaches a Current Events class for seniors at the Gassr Building in Napa. Michalski is a retired Napa history professor who recently co-wrote a book about the Jews of Napa Valley.
(Chris Riley/Times-Herald)

Now that he's retired from teaching high school history, Henry Michalski of Napa said he has time to write about his own family's harrowing historical tale.

The 67-year-old co-authored a recently published book on the Jews of the Napa Valley and is working on another, more personal account of his family's escape from Nazi-occupied Poland.

Ed Lerman of Napa, the new book's editor, said he's pleased to help with that project.

"Henry is a guy I respect a lot," he said. "He has an incredible story to tell, which I look forward to everybody getting an opportunity to read. And he's a great teacher -- he's been teaching here in Napa since 1968, and in that time, has touched many lives."

Michalski's story starts at a time when the world "over there" had gone crazy.

"I was born in Kazakhstan because my mother fled Poland in 1939, after the Nazis invaded," he said. "My father was a cavalry soldier in the Polish army, but he'd been captured and sent to a POW camp in Ukraine, and my mother and her brother set out to find him, there. She was 19."

Michalski said his grandparents and their other daughter decided to take their chances in the "work camps" the Germans had promised they'd be released from once the war ended. None of them survived, he said.

"My mother and her brother were caught by the Russians for not having the appropriate papers, and sent to Siberia, where they spent some time before they were released to make room for the German POWs," he said. "They were just released, with nothing, put on a wooden raft full of people and sent down the river."

They landed in Kazakhstan, where the man who became Michalski's father eventually found the woman who would become his mother, who was then dying of typhoid.

"He'd been kicked out of the army for being Jewish and went to Siberia looking for her, but someone there who knew her, told him where she'd gone and he came to find her."

One day, she sent her brother to town for coffee and by some "miracle" the two men ran into each other, Michalski said.

"My father sold his army blanket and other gear to buy food and whatever else he needed to nurse my mother back to health, and they were married there, by some public servant, since there was no rabbi, and with what my mother always said was a 'common criminal' as a witness," he said. "My mother, who was a seamstress, made a dress out of some Red Cross burlap sacks that had held wheat, and my father, who was a sheet metal worker, made a ring from a coin."

An older brother was born and then Michalski arrived in 1945 just as the war was ending. The young family made its way back to Europe, where they learned about the Holocaust and discovered they were not safe in their former Polish homes, he said.

"The Poles thought the Jews were all dead, and had stolen their businesses and homes, and people coming back were being killed by their former neighbors," he said.

The family applied to leave the country, and spent nearly three years in a German Displaced Persons camp before an opportunity arose to come to the United States, he said. Michalski's surviving uncle, emigrated to Israel.

"I remember my father lifting me onto a table and telling me in Yiddish, 'tomorrow, we're going on a big ship to America," he said. "I remember that word had a magic to it... the look on people's faces when they said it -- like it was paradise."

Four at the time, Michalski said he remembers the ship's passengers weeping at the sight of the Statue of Liberty as they entered New York Harbor.

Finding New York too difficult, the family moved west, and Michalski said he grew up in San Francisco's "rough" Fillmore district, where his interest in history, current events and Israel was born and nurtured at his parents' kitchen table.

The passions that grew from those discussions between his parents and their other survivor friends have served him well, he said.

Originally planning a career in music, Michalski's mother suggested he go with his passion for history, instead.

"Best advice she ever gave me," he said.

Contact staff writer Rachel Raskin-Zrihen at (707) 553-6824 or rzrihen@timesheraldonline.com. Follow her on Twitter at RachelVTH.

Henry Michalski

Occupation: Retired after 36 years as a history teacher, now an author, Sunday school teacher and seniors' current events instructor

Hometown: Napa by way of Kazakhstan, New York and San Francisco

Family: Wife, Lynn, two children, one grandchild with another due, 94-year-old mother and two brothers.

Quote: "I'm a busy guy, but I like it that way. My mother has a saying about that. She says, 'you have plenty of time to slow down when you're dead.' She lives by that credo, and, I guess, so do I."